


to carthage then i came burning

by auxanges



Series: the nothing kings [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Canon-Typical Violence, Double Penetration, First Time, M/M, Porn With Plot, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 10:25:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18915052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: “They all know,” you say. “Or they will, soon.”Sol’s picking at the bottle’s label. “So what will you do?”“Make sure I’m the one who tells them.”





	to carthage then i came burning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkp0p](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkp0p/gifts).



> known erisol dabbler ende requested more of this series, specifically from this part in _the nothing kings:_  
>  "The first time you and Eridan pailed, he’d just gotten slapped with his commission bars the night before, and his eyes were fever-bright with the closest thing to fear he would let himself show you." 
> 
> this whole series is just being written in reverse at this point thank god time is a construct

You scored second on all your intake tests except Ranged Weapons Assessment. Not for lack of trying—they froze your strife specibus and everything—but you can’t run from destiny, even if you declare yourself a staunch non-believer in the stuff. 

On the way back, your clearance admin cornered you, boxed you on both fins and gave you seventy-two hours to retake the tests, no bullshit.

Bullshit’s your specialty, but you’re pretty sure he knows that.

* * *

Postings will be announced before week’s end, they say, when they slip the epaulettes into place, still stiff with starch. You’ll be fitted to a hand-picked ship and fuck off to some exoplanet or inhabited moon, lather-rinse-suck-up. Standing in your navy dress regs, you can’t feel anything from the waist down. Your mind’s watching the tide roll in.

* * *

You don’t even get a clean break from parade, because you’re you, and clean breaks are some foreign concept you never learned, to the chagrin of moirails past and present (and most of the population). You’re concentrating on the left-right-left of your journey out of the barracks the next evening when gossiping turd hits the oscillators.

_I heard he’s shacked up with a battery._

_No shit. He tried throwing intake, you think that’s why?_

Your blood is like shards of glass. 

The first cadet is dead before you can wrestle your moral compass back into submission. He would’ve been dead before season’s end, anyway, judging by the scores on the hextag you filch and captchalogue out of nothing more than habit. The second cadet’s feet are dangling some inches off the ground, held aloft by your forearm and a woefully short fuse. 

“If I need help ruinin my rep,” you inform him quietly, “I’ll ask. But til then I’d thank you not to try disgracing me again.”

He drops, and you clear out with a growing weight at the base of your skull.

* * *

You’re so busy fighting with your collar that you almost don’t notice him taking up most of your couch.

Almost, of course, because as quiet and isolated as Sollux can attempt to make himself, you’re nigh impossible to hide from. This was established early on in your relationship. 

“See, this is why I don’t bother givin you a key,” you mutter, tossing your tunic at him. “You find your way in anyway. Like a six-four termite.”

“That’s super rude to termites.”

Sol’s sprawled on his back, which means he’s having a good day, the lucky shithead. (You know that’s not true in the long run, but you’re feeling pretty goddamn in the present right about now.) He reaches, unhurried, to remove your uniform from his face: when he sees the thumb-width gold bars, he whistles. “Ooh, your official douchery finally dropped. Shall I salute you? Did they draw blood to get that stitch swatch just right?”

“Yes they did,” you shoot back, kicking off your shoes, “if only so you could have a chance to say ‘stitch swatch.’”

He whips your tunic back at you, and you smack it out of the air kinda like a wriggler. There’s a pause, then, as you both size each other up. Your hive holds its breath. 

Sollux ruins it. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, do I have to flex my single interrogative bone to find out why you snapped some rando’s neck or are we coasting on the assumption that helm fitting yoinked it out of its cozy home?”

You bristle. “How’d you know?”

He taps his temple; it makes his eyes pulse a little brighter, but you don’t think he notices. “Death was quick, but apparently cursing you is quicker. I admire the guy’s priorities.”

“Wergh.” You card both hands through your hair. It’s a less than stellar night to remember how often you’ve been the perpetrator of Sol’s background noise. “It was dumb.”

“Normally, I’d agree, but…” Sollux looks you over again, half-floating himself upright. “You look like shit, ED.”

“Not in a fun way, I’m guessin?”

“Sit your ass down and, like, drink some water or whatever it is you healthy waders do.”

You sit your ass down in slow motion, like it was your idea and not his—you know, like a good pitchmate—and give the footrest a little kick with your heel. The cooler springs free and you snag a bottle, knocking back a third of its contents: almost immediately, your sea-parts cool. You’re well aware it’s psychosomatic, but even early symptoms of the Dry tend to freak you out.

The list of warm things you like is pretty restricted. 

After your second drink you realize you’re breathing kind of hard. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Sollux steals your water bottle for a swig, then makes a face. 

“Lookin at me crooked.” 

“Ampora, dude, your shiphive is perma-tipped thirteen degrees northeast. If anything here is actually crooked, it’s you.”

Your fins snap hard enough to scatter stars across your vision. The clearance admin’s pen tap-tap-clicks just under your skull, accusing.

“They all know,” you say. “Or they will, soon.”

Sol’s picking at the bottle’s label. “So what will you do?” 

“Make sure I’m the one who tells them.”

You’re not sure who’s more surprised—you, hearing your affirmation on some sort of delay, or Sollux, who jerks forward as if on strings to kiss you with such urgency you both knock over the bottle while trying to brace on the couch. 

He sparks reflexively. “Fuck! That’s cold on the crotch.” He also doesn’t bother to pull away while he complains.

“Then take your pants off, dipshit.”

You’re way too jacked up on the blind terror of the unknown to leave room for self-consciousness: the closest Sollux and you have come to seeing each other naked was right after his implants and when you cracked a rib replacing your data access masthead, respectively. As is often the case (to no one’s surprise more than your own) you’re on the same wavelength, if a bit uncoordinated—both of you kick off your pants and jam a few knees into a few thighs in the process. 

Romance.

* * *

Sollux Captor is, taxonomically speaking, a mess. They’ll have to keep feeding his setup if he keeps growing; you know of only three asymmetrical pressure points around his headgear that won’t shock you when you prod at his migraines; on a good day, he’s about as stable as the eroding cliff you’re parked on. Every time you think you have a good hold on him, he shuffles the deck and you start over. When you tug up his shirt to run your palms over the divots between his ribs, you learn more than you did in the past sweep of infantrepidation feeds.

“Fuck,” Sol repeats, when he unsheathes wetly. He tries to twist his face away from you, an action that you are having none of—you close your hand around his jaw and claim his mouth again, only a little more viciously than you initially intended. 

His fangs are a merciful sting on your bottom lip: a groan of appreciation escapes you, and doesn’t go unnoticed. Sollux isn’t as loud as you are (or at all) in any situation, but you feel his exhale lodge in his chest. The thrill of victory is enough to coax your bulge free, and you clumsily reach between you to get a feel for what you’re working with.

Sollux tears through your shirt the instant your fingers wrap around his bulges. It feels like a dissection—pinpricks of power sink into the sensitive tissue around your gills until you give in and gasp. Nothing you’ve come across has yet to compete with this feeling, and you’ve come across some pretty weird shit in your life as a walking talking occupational hazard. 

You are both embarrassingly new to this. Sol’s just gun-shy enough about pailing for you to know he’s done it before; your experience begins and ends at one vodka-fuelled shitstorm that resulted in you and Vris avoiding eye contact for a week. It means you’re both swept up in that same needy apprehension—that same urge to leave your brains behind for a while, and that same irritation of not being quite sure how.

Luckily, your biology decides that’s enough pathetic feel-copping and takes over. 

“Oh, Christ,” you babble, or something to that effect. You can’t really concentrate with the way your bulge is trying to guide one of his in. Your freckles are competing with his pyrotechnics and very obviously losing.

“Landing strips,” you both say, and then both groan, because synchronizing is a blackrom cliché neither of you are equipped to deal with while he’s straddling you bare-assed on your couch. You find the small of his back and pull him against you until you both get what you want. 

Once he’s in you, Sollux kind of stills. His mouth is at the base of your fin; you can feel the current he’s shoving down, and it rearranges your insides in a way that is definitely new, haha. All it does is make you writhe until he drops his semblance of control and pistons his hips hard in time with yours. Your moan cuts itself off and picks up again, a stutter of noise. Sol watches it unfold: his eyes are darker, their usual glow tracking instead along his throat and down his arms. He’s more alive than you’ve seen him in weeks. The earlier moan hinges into a laugh.

“Something funny?” He’s bleeding from where your teeth pricked his tongue. 

“Get the other one in,” you reply, tactfully. 

“What?” his hips snap in surprise. Your gills all follow suit, forcing the remaining air from your chest cavity, and you lie there open-mouthed for a minute like…well, like a fish. “ED—”

“The other one, c’mon.” You swat your own bulge away from yourself; it seeks out Sollux instead, and the shock of his body heat as you slip into him lifts your spine off the couch cushions. You’re so tired of cold. The sea, the sky—where the fuck else are you supposed to find fire like this?

Sol buries into you with no less fervour, your nerves trapped like minnows in the fist he’s got around your horn. It sets a current through your teeth, and you commit the feeling of Sollux occupying every sense you have to memory. 

He’s an eclipse to his own star. 

You grapple at his back, your fingers dragging heavily over the ports replacing his vertebrae. It makes him shout, a sound he redirects as energy around the pair of you. There’s no more space for thought, let alone banter. Sollux demands the attention of all your synapses, and compliances comes like a swell, submerging you.

You buck up into him, your hands in his overgrown hair, and Sol kind of shakes all over in the grip of climax, and somewhere beyond your ken the tide is crawling away from shore.

* * *

It takes almost another full bottle of water before you can really reacquaint yourself with gravity. You’re content to coast on the warmth of Sol’s body, the way his pusher hammers against your chest just so: you don’t need his diagnosis to hatch terrible ideas and follow them to the grave, but it’s moments like these that make the call of the void a little easier to resist.

You mash your face into his neck for good measure. Sollux smells like sweat and stormclouds, a pleasant heaviness against your fins. It coaxes confessions free—he’s the furthest thing from a sea-saint, is Sollux, but that’s okay because you don’t believe in sea-saints, that’s centuries dead. The both of you, if the last hour has been anything to go by, are very much not dead. 

You roll yourself onto your side: the couch is damp, but half your hive is usually somewhere on the dampness scale, and Sollux is too busy basking in whatever bastard child of afterglow and awkward silence you two have sired. “I’ll find you,” you say.

He raises his head. You feel the pull and shift of his muscles, too stubborn to let themselves be forgotten in favour of machinery. “What?”

“When they call us up,” you specify, rolling more until your positions are reversed. Sollux is on his back again, sighing at the aches you dredged up to the surface: the wince is confined to the impossible depths of his eyes, where someone of your ranking can’t see it. “I don’t give a shit how long it takes, how many Fleet boots I have to lick—”

He snorts. You give a little push with the heel of your hand against his collarbone. “They’re fuckin thick if they think they have a hold on you, Sol.”

And he does it again—he lets himself believe you. 

A wave batters the far wall, restless. Looks like it’ll storm after all. 

**Author's Note:**

> this au effectively belongs to [bean](https://beanellinies.tumblr.com/) but if you are interested in seeing more of it, or any au of mine, or just have questions, find me on tumblr @ auxanges. see you fools next time


End file.
